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Monday, September 08, 2008

Lies, Lies, Lies, Yeah!

Sorry for sticking that Thompson Twins song in your head, but it’s the first thing that comes to mind when I consider the McCain campaign strategy with regards to Sarah Palin’s involvement with the boondoggle “Bridge to Nowhere.”

How is it that Palin got away with telling a blatant lie about her support for the “Bridge to Nowhere” during her first appearance with McCain shortly after being tapped to be his runningmate? And then, even after her claim was exposed as a lie, she repeated it during her speech to the convention. And now, despite all evidence to the contrary, the McCain campaign is making the same fallacious claim in its latest TV ad.

Obviously, the truth does not matter to them. But how can they get away with it?I think, as Greenwald points out today, they can get by with this because the wingnutsphere controls our national media:

The single dumbest claim in our political culture is that the huge corporations which own our establishment media outlets promote a "liberal" ideology. Why would General Electric ever use NBC and its other media assets to promote political liberalism? They lavishly benefit from the whole panoply of right-wing policies -- from endlessly expanding defense spending to deregulation. Their multiple businesses depend upon maintaining good relations with the right-wing ideologues who run our Government. Even ignoring all of the above-documented empirical facts, the very idea that a corporation like GE -- or Viacom (CBS), Disney (ABC) and Time Warner (CNN) -- would actively promote a left-wing agenda in its news divisions and undermine the very Government power centers on which they rely has been the most self-evidently moronic premise one can imagine. And yet that myth persists, and even intensifies.

When people get all their news from Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and all the other professional progagandists working for and on behalf of the corporate power structure, they become easy to manipulate and are easy to lie to. Gullible and easily duped, these are the people who sway with the prevailing breeze and the media’s corporate masters make sure it always comes from a rightward direction.

What I’m wondering now is how they expect to deal with this during the vice presidential debates. Do they hope to get the format such that Biden will not have an opportunity to make hay out of the issue? Will she repeat the lie, proffer a lame excuse or just ignore it? Or, more likely, she will take the preferred Republican method and just “attack, attack, attack”, ignoring her own hypocrisy and leveling charge after charge at the opposition.